At various times since getting elected, the current White House resident, when not admiring his reflection in the mirror, has likened himself to Lincoln, Reagan, JFK, LBJ, MLK, and, for all we know, Socrates, Bismarck, da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Moses, Gandhi, Michael Jordan, and Ron Jeremy. By now, these comparisons run laughably hollow, reminding us of the socially-awkward married guy at work who, ogling the outrageously attractive office secretary, boasts to a younger, single colleague, “What’s the matter with you kid? If I weren’t married…fuhgeddaboudit.” Continue reading →

The South China Morning Post will take its content in a different direction under Alibaba. (Image: http://www.buzzfeed.com)

Last Friday, Alibaba (ticker BABA), the Chinese e-commerce Leviathan with a $200 billion market cap, announced that it was buying the South China Morning Post (“SCMP”), Hong Kong’s biggest English-language newspaper. The 112-year-old broadsheet is popular for its English-language format and the editorial board’s intrepid reputation (or life-threatening stupidity/naiveté) for covering not only political contretemps on mainland China but also the Communist Party’s gobsmackingly disgraceful suppression of human rights, topics from which mainland journalists understandably shy away for fear of being “disappeared.”

Non sequitur, noun, according to Merriam-Webster: a statement that is not connected in a logical or clear way to anything said before it. Usually, upon hearing a non sequitur, you shake your head in stupefaction but then notice that your interlocutor is wearing his trousers inside-out and is completely insane. However, occasionally a presumably preposterous pronouncement makes all the sense in the world when the speaker’s identity and warped Weltanschauung are considered. President Obama, looking as world-weary as ever, provided a nice example yesterday when he actually said the following during a press conference with French President François Hollande, who is daily proving that he is a more serious person than our frivolous President (video above):

Next week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the Global Climate Conference. What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be, when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.

A source at ISIS Pharmaceuticals (ticker ISIS) has told Bud Fox News that the company was inundated with phone calls last week from men who mistakenly thought that the company was a US-based offshoot of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, aka ISIS. Company spokesman Stuyvesant Gudgeon explained:

We’ve been swamped. I took several calls myself. These men are convinced that we represent ISIS here in the States. Some had looked through our annual report and concluded that the table showing our drug pipeline was actually a list of chemical weapons that caused the conditions addressed by each drug. One guy called and asked how quickly ATL1102 would cause Muliple Sclerosis and could it be put in the water supply. Another guy asked to speak to our chief financial officer because he needed money- he said a guy at his mosque could get an RPG if the caller could produce enough cash.

These misguided, US-hating Mujahideen manqués aren’t the only ones who have been fooled. Hous Bin Pharteen, Professor of Islamic Studies at Beaver College and author of the soon-to-be-published Allah vs Challa: Islam and the Defeat of Zionism, appeared equally misled when reached for comment by Bud Fox News:Continue reading →

On Monday, Judicial Watch released more than 35 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton’s erstwhile top State Dept handmaiden Huma Abedin that reveal the type of Clintonian behavior that no longer shocks, to wit, security breaches and special treatment requests for Clinton friends. You can read all about it here. What is hilarious though, and perhaps more of a concern, is this exchange between Abedin and Clinton minion Monica Hanley:

Abedin: Have you been going over her calls with her? So she knows singh is at 8? [India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh]

Hanley: She was in bed for a nap by the time I heard that she had an 8am call. Will go over with her

Over a long and storied career, Securities and Exchange Commission chairwoman Mary Jo White developed a reputation for being a tough prosecutor and litigator, belying her diminutive stature. But she’s not so tough anymore.

As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, when she wasn’t facing down mobsters like John Gotti, she was putting terrorists like Ramzi Yousef (the 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind) under the hot lamps. After her time as a prosecutor, she spent 10 years as chair of the litigation department at Devevoise & Plimpton, a white shoe New York City law firm.

As an unfortunate byproduct of this otherwise fruitful juridical pilgrimage, Ms. White came to know many characters on Wall Street, big business bosses, regulators, law makers, and prosecutors. When one runs in these rarefied circles long enough, you eventually become friendly with many of your “adversaries” and a system of favors and quid-pro-quo’s develops which helps maintain a stasis between the various powers of big business, government, and regulatory institutions.

A fine example of this is found in the story of Gary Aguirre, as well detailed in this Rolling Stone piece.

Aguirre joined the SEC in September 2004. Two days into his career as a financial investigator, he was asked to look into an insider-trading complaint against a hedge-fund megastar named Art Samberg. One day, with no advance research or discussion, Samberg had suddenly started buying up huge quantities of shares in a firm called Heller Financial. “It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller,” Aguirre recalls. “And he wasn’t just buying shares — there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day.” A few weeks later, Heller was bought by General Electric — and Samberg pocketed $18 million.

After some digging, Aguirre found himself focusing on one suspect as the likely source who had tipped Samberg off: John Mack, a close friend of Samberg’s who had just stepped down as president of Morgan Stanley. At the time, Mack had been on Samberg’s case to cut him into a deal involving a spinoff of the tech company Lucent — an investment that stood to make Mack a lot of money. “Mack is busting my chops” to give him a piece of the action, Samberg told an employee in an e-mail.

A week later, Mack flew to Switzerland to interview for a top job at Credit Suisse First Boston. Among the investment bank’s clients, as it happened, was a firm called Heller Financial. We don’t know for sure what Mack learned on his Swiss trip; years later, Mack would claim that he had thrown away his notes about the meetings. But we do know that as soon as Mack returned from the trip, on a Friday, he called up his buddy Samberg. The very next morning, Mack was cut into the Lucent deal — a favor that netted him more than $10 million. And as soon as the market reopened after the weekend, Samberg started buying every Heller share in sight, right before it was snapped up by GE — a suspiciously timed move that earned him the equivalent of Derek Jeter’s annual salary for just a few minutes of work.

The case seemed open and shut, but as Aguirre would soon find out, it was mostly shut. In the summer of 2005 when Aguirre told his boss he planned to interview Mack, things “started to get weird”. Aguirre was “contacted” (read hounded) by folks from Morgan Stanley, then an aide to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, then the SEC got a call from one of the firm’s top dog lawyers: none other than, you guessed it, Mary Jo White, herself the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York- the top cop on Wall Street. Continue reading →

New Jersey State Prison: The likely home to some recent, and future, Rutgers football recruits. (Photo: http://www.wikipedia.com)

Having sold its academic soul to pursue big-time television contract money when it decided to join the Big Ten conference, whose network eases the guilty conscience of each school’s president with as much as $25 million a year, Rutgers, who lost to Penn State on Saturday 28-3, now needs to hire a public relations firm to deal with the ugly aftermath of its decision. According to an article on Forbes.com:

In the last [month], seven players have been arrested. Four, including Barnwell [BFN: felicitous first name of Nadir], are charged with aggravated assault and two face armed robbery charges in connection with home invasions during April and May. The seventh player, wide receiver Leonte Carroo, is accused of slamming a woman’s head into concrete outside the Rutgers football facility. [BFN: In addition, head coach Kyle Flood has been suspended three games and fined $50,000 for improperly contacting a professor about a player’s grade.]

These arrests aren’t the result of scholar-athletes getting a bit carried away after the big game; there’s no drunk in public or public urination here, not even a DUI. On the plus side for damn-the-consequences Rutgers sports fans, the seriousness of the charges shows that the school is making a sincere effort to recruit the type of law breakers who play football and masquerade as students at the most successful college football programs (this list of “most arrested” school teams reads like a perennial top 25).

Recognizing that violent criminals often make great football players but also trying to give second chances to those who have paid their debts to society, Rutgers will fill the seven roster vacancies by creating a Football Apprenticeship Release Timetable program (“FART”) for violent but trusted felons at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton. The program, similar to one at Florida State, will allow prisoners to leave confinement for practice and games but not to attend class (since class attendance is optional and actually discouraged at most top football schools). Continue reading →

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"I wouldn't buy a used car from a university president. They'll say, 'We're making moves to cut costs,' and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired." -Richard Vedder, economist

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